ATLANTA, GA–(Marketwired – Aug 21, 2015) – Michael Daugherty, a cybersecurity expert and author of the book “The Devil in Inside the Beltway” (www.michaeljdaugherty.com), will be a case-study speaker at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Sydney, Australia.

The summit, scheduled Aug. 24-25, is Daugherty’s first stop on a speaking tour of Australia.

Daugherty’s speech at the Gartner summit is titled “A Matter of Style — How America’s FTC’s Tricks, Tactics and Agenda Impact World Cybersecurity.”

The Gartner summit is designed to equip security and risk managers with the skills, knowledge, strategies and tactics that enable cost-effective security and risk management programs.

Daugherty, speaking on day two of the summit, will discuss the story told in his book of his experience with the Federal Trade Commission. That experience began in 2008 after his company, LabMD, received a call from Tiversa, a technology security firm. Tiversa claimed that LabMD patient-billing information was vulnerable and offered its services, for a fee, to fix the problem, Daugherty says.

He viewed the call as a shakedown and declined. Tiversa turned over its information to the FTC, which launched an investigation. In August 2013, the FTC filed a formal complaint, alleging that LabMD failed to reasonably protect the security of consumers’ personal data, including medical information.

Daugherty scored a significant victory May 5 when a former Tiversa employee testified in the FTC case that Tiversa did not find LabMD patient information on Internet sites, but instead hacked into LabMD’s computer system.

Daugherty recently spoke on cybersecurity and healthcare at a Black Hat USA security gathering in Las Vegas and at the annual DefCon hacking conference.

Maybe it should be called Devils, as Mike Daugherty comments on the DC mentality that we are witnessing today…Hillary’s email server, GOP shock at Donald Trump’s campaign, Obama in Alaska while a child washes up on the shore. Every day, every moment we are seeing the storm clouds form over due to the behaviors of the Devil Inside the Beltway. Michael J Daugherty crystallizes what creates all these monsters.

Stay tuned for an 8 part installment of videos describing Michael’s story. The first one to be shared next week.

ATLANTA, GA — (Marketwired) — 08/21/15 — Michael Daugherty, a cybersecurity expert and author of the book “The Devil in Inside the Beltway” (www.michaeljdaugherty.com), will be a case-study speaker at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Sydney, Australia.

The summit, scheduled Aug. 24-25, is Daugherty’s first stop on a speaking tour of Australia.

Daugherty’s speech at the Gartner summit is titled “A Matter of Style — How America’s FTC’s Tricks, Tactics and Agenda Impact World Cybersecurity.”

The Gartner summit is designed to equip security and risk managers with the skills, knowledge, strategies and tactics that enable cost-effective security and risk management programs.

Daugherty, speaking on day two of the summit, will discuss the story told in his book of his experience with the Federal Trade Commission. That experience began in 2008 after his company, LabMD, received a call from Tiversa, a technology security firm. Tiversa claimed that LabMD patient-billing information was vulnerable and offered its services, for a fee, to fix the problem, Daugherty says.

He viewed the call as a shakedown and declined. Tiversa turned over its information to the FTC, which launched an investigation. In August 2013, the FTC filed a formal complaint, alleging that LabMD failed to reasonably protect the security of consumers’ personal data, including medical information.

Daugherty scored a significant victory May 5 when a former Tiversa employee testified in the FTC case that Tiversa did not find LabMD patient information on Internet sites, but instead hacked into LabMD’s computer system.

Daugherty recently spoke on cybersecurity and healthcare at a Black Hat USA security gathering in Las Vegas and at the annual DefCon hacking conference.

ATLANTA, Ga. – Michael Daugherty, a cybersecurity expert and author of the book “The Devil in Inside the Beltway” (www.michaeljdaugherty.com), will be a case-study speaker at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Sydney, Australia.

The summit, scheduled Aug. 24-25, is Daugherty’s first stop on a speaking tour of Australia.

Daugherty’s speech at the Gartner summit is titled “A Matter of Style – How America’s FTC’s Tricks, Tactics and Agenda Impact World Cybersecurity.”

The Gartner summit is designed to equip security and risk managers with the skills, knowledge, strategies and tactics that enable cost-effective security and risk management programs.

Daugherty, speaking on day two of the summit, will discuss the story told in his book of his experience with the Federal Trade Commission. That experience began in 2008 after his company, LabMD, received a call from Tiversa, a technology security firm. Tiversa claimed that LabMD patient-billing information was vulnerable and offered its services, for a fee, to fix the problem, Daugherty says.

He viewed the call as a shakedown and declined. Tiversa turned over its information to the FTC, which launched an investigation. In August 2013, the FTC filed a formal complaint, alleging that LabMD failed to reasonably protect the security of consumers’ personal data, including medical information.

Daugherty scored a significant victory May 5 when a former Tiversa employee testified in the FTC case that Tiversa did not find LabMD patient information on Internet sites, but instead hacked into LabMD’s computer system.

Daugherty recently spoke on cybersecurity and healthcare at a Black Hat USA security gathering in Las Vegas and at the annual DefCon hacking conference.

Michael has been at Black Hat for the past few days. Here’s is a reblog of the best summary of the event. This has been reblogged from Examiner.com

courtesy of Wikipedia.org

Black Hat, the annual gathering in Las Vegas of hackers, researchers, government officials and corporate security chiefs, is perhaps the most significant cybersecurity conference of the year. That’s not because it makes major news about advances in new security technology, but more often it reveals deep and serious flaws in how we are protected from criminal mischief. And yet yesterday’s opening session focused less on how smartphones, cars, and even satellites can be hacked (yes, they all can), but more significantly how growing mistrust between the technology community and our own government is threatening to blow wide open.

The tone was set in the morning’s opening keynote by Jennifer Granick, a director with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Granick, who has been attending Black Hat and another hacker conference, Def Con, for a long time, did not mince words before an audience that responds well to candor. “The dream of Internet freedom that brought me to Def Con twenty years ago is dying,” said Granick.

She pointed to increased government regulation, both in the U.S. and abroad, as a major reason for her concern, citing misguided laws and zealous overregulation on the part of Congress as key factors. “The message from our government is that if you step over the line, we will come for you,” Granick told the somber gathering.

Sessions that followed her on the densely packed Black Hat program helped reinforce her concern. One of the day’s most stunning examples was the story of LabMD, an Atlanta-based medical technology company who has been fighting a two year battle with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Appearing at a session yesterday afternoon, LabMD’s founder, Michael Daugherty described how one supposedly leaked file led the FTC to prosecute his company without the kind of disclosure normally found in a court of law.

“The FTC, like most agencies, has playbooks that are top secret,” said Daugherty, who ultimately was forced to close his company and fire over 40 employees. But he has refused to give in to the FTC.

The story of LabMD has been documented in bits and pieces in the press for the last year as the case rolled on. The gist, as recounted yesterday by Daugherty and described more recently in the media, is that the FTC acted when a mysterious private cybersecurity company called Tiversa provided them with evidence (which Daugherty has yet to see) of a data breach. According to the LabMD founder, his company refused an offer from Tiversa to “fix the problem” for a fee, which prompted the cybsersecurity firm to notify the FTC.

Three months ago, a former Tiversa employee testified in federal court that the company engaged in fraud and shakedowns of small technology companies.

Daugherty has documented his saga in a book, “The Devil Inside the Beltway,” and expressed concern yesterday that the FTC needs to be reigned in by Congress. “All this is to me is bullying behavior,” said Daugherty.

Despite presentations like the LabMD case, the program at Black Hat also included government representatives seeking to mend fences and perhaps build bridges to the hacking and security research community. For the first time in memory, a high ranking official from Department of Justice attended Black Hat and presented his side of a tough story.

Leonard Bailey, the special counsel for national security at the Department of Justice, made his point that of the over 56,000 cases filed by the federal government last year, only 194 of them dealt with computer fraud.

“We’re not coming after security researchers,” said Bailey.

But the Justice official acknowledged that prosecution of computer crime can have an intended impact. “All it takes is one flogging in the public square, and there’s a chilling effect,” said Bailey.

The Department of Justice has come under fire in the hacking community over theprosecution of Aaron Swartz, a hacktivist who was arrested for creating a program at MIT that would automatically download academic journal articles. Faced with 35 years in prison, Schwartz committed suicide in 2013.

The first question for Bailey from the audience yesterday concerned his agency’s handling of the Swartz case. “That was a tragedy,” said Bailey, but he refused to comment further.

Another government enforcement agency on the Black Hat agenda yesterday was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Three members of the team that recently brought down one of the most significant cybercrime operations ever discovered, the Gameover Zeus botnet, presented their findings to a captivated audience.

The operation targeted a vast network of one million infected machines that systematically looted banks and corporations. “They were able to move money a lot faster than we were able to chase it,” said Elliott Peterson, a special agent with the FBI.

According to Peterson, Zeus was run by a sophisticated mix of Russian and Ukraine criminals, led by a man named Evgeniy Bogachev who has yet to be caught. The FBI announced yesterday that they are offering an unprecedented $3 million reward for information leading to Bogachev’s arrest.

Peterson was joined by the highly-regarded security researcher Michael Sandee who highlighted one curious aspect of the Zeus case. According to Sandee, the code created to steal money was also designed to gather government and intelligence agency data. “This is something we don’t typically see in financial malware,” said Sandee.

As the power of Internet continues to grow, there is a great deal at stake for governments, corporations, and individual citizens. This week’s Black Hat dialogue only reinforced the feeling that sorting all of this out will be difficult and contentious at best. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate adjourned for their summer recess yesterday without taking action on a cybersecurity bill passed by the House three months ago.

While the FTC, FCC and Homeland Security joust over who is going to regulate the internet, Michael J. Daugherty will rivet you about his blood in the water battle with the Federal Trade Commission over their relentless investigation into LabMD’s data security practices showing you what they do to those who dare not “go along to get along.”

This is an insider’s look at how agencies exploit their power by bullying the small and weak to control the private sector. You will hear about Mike’s shrewd investigation of the investigator (FTC) which resulted in a House Oversight investigation, a stinging Congressional report about the FTC’s behavior, and criminal immunity from the Justice Department for a whistleblower. The administrative case against LabMD, stayed in June 2014 when the whistleblower pled the 5th, started again May 5, 2015, after criminal immunity had been granted. Mike exposes the real time maneuvers of government lawyers and regulators who are accustomed to no one looking.

Because of his work, Mike has testified before the House of Representatives House Oversight Committee and regularly keynotes in front of healthcare, law, business and technology audiences educating them on what to expect when the Federal Government investigates you.

While the FTC, FCC and Homeland Security joust over who is going to regulate the internet, Michael J. Daugherty will rivet you about his blood in the water battle with the Federal Trade Commission over their relentless investigation into LabMD’s data security practices showing you what they do to those who dare not “go along to get along.”

This is an insider’s look at how agencies exploit their power by bullying the small and weak to control the private sector. You will hear about Mike’s shrewd investigation of the investigator (FTC) which resulted in a House Oversight investigation, a stinging Congressional report about the FTC’s behavior, and criminal immunity from the Justice Department for a whistleblower. The administrative case against LabMD, stayed in June 2014 when the whistleblower pled the 5th, started again May 5, 2015, after criminal immunity had been granted. Mike exposes the real time maneuvers of government lawyers and regulators who are accustomed to no one looking.

Because of his work, Mike has testified before the House of Representatives House Oversight Committee and regularly keynotes in front of healthcare, law, business and technology audience educating them on what to expect when the Federal Government investigates you.

The Devil Inside The Beltway

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